Faith–Based Diplomacy: The Work of the Prophets

By Brian Cox

The rise of religion and religious actors combined with nonstate actors increasing influence in the international order has become the new normal. These fundamental changes in the security environment call for a new paradigm to address national security concerns. That paradigm must acknowledge the cultural and historical factors at the heart of many identity-based conflicts and advance the role of nation-states in resolving them.

That emerging paradigm is faith-based diplomacy, and this bookwritten by one of the worlds leading expertsdescribes the principles and methodology of this form of engagement in the strategic political realm. It is informed by twenty-five years of experience in some of the worlds roughest neighborhoods, including East Central Europe and the Balkans, Sudan, Kashmir, and the Middle East.

Canon Brian Cox is an ordained Episcopal priest; a pastor in Santa Barbara, California; a diplomat with a Washington, DC, nongovernmental organization; and a professor in a law schoolbased conflict-resolution program in Southern California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503550933

Brian Cox

Brian Cox, Ph.D., is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Dr. Cox is also a Royal Society research fellow and a researcher on the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is perhaps best known as a science broadcaster and host of the BBC’s hugely popular Wonders series. He is the coauthor of three companion books to these series, which have become #1 Sunday Times bestsellers, as well as two narrative works of popular science, The Quantum Universe and Why Does E = mc2? In the 1990s he played keyboards for the UK pop band D:Ream.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Brian Cox.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/04/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

696563

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Principles of Faith-Based Diplomacy

Chapter Three: Methods of Faith-Based Intermediaries

Chapter Four: Lessons Learned from the Field

Chapter Five: Syria: Dispatches from the Front Lines

Chapter Six: Faith-Based Diplomacy in East Central Europe and the Balkans

Chapter Seven: Faith-Based Diplomacy in Kashmir

Chapter Eight: Faith-Based Diplomacy in the Middle East

Chapter Nine: Concluding Thoughts

DEDICATION

To my wife, Ann, who has been a faithful partner in life from our days together in Cambridge to Beaumont to Newport Beach to Washington DC to Santa Barbara. You have been there every step of the way as God’s call to faith-based diplomacy has unfolded in my life.

To my children, Clare and John. This is the legacy I bequeath to you … a twenty-first-century model called faith-based reconciliation. It is a model grounded in the sovereignty of God that seeks to restore right relationships between communities and to make God visible in the strategic political realm.

To my grandchildren. Your generation will be facing global disorder, and in the midst of that chaos, they will be searching for a star to guide them. Faith-based reconciliation is a powerful idea that will guide you because it is the power to change the human heart, which belongs to God alone.

To the people of Christ the King Church in Santa Barbara, California. You were the very community that God chose to give birth and to nurture a powerful idea. You had the vision and the generosity to embrace a prophetic calling—a faith community ahead of your time. You had the seeds of a vital personal faith in God that were faithfully planted by the founders of the community and nurtured by its shepherds. Like Abraham, you trusted God one step at a time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not be complete without acknowledging the many people that have contributed to the work of faith-based diplomacy over the past twenty-five years.

First, I would like to acknowledge the individuals who shared with me in the work of faith-based diplomacy in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the 1990s. Bill St. Cyr and I shared many adventures together as part of the East Central European Core Group of the National Prayer Breakfast. His wisdom and friendship, together with that of Doug Coe, had a profound impact on my understanding of this emerging discipline. Juraj Kohutiar of Slovakia was the key figure that opened the door of Slovakia to faith-based reconciliation. We shared many missions together to the Balkans including Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Together, we witnessed the supernatural hand of God, particularly one day on a journey from Pristine to Belgrade. Dr. Peter Lucaciu of Romania and I met at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1993. We first conducted a diplomatic mission together to Moldova in 1994. Our most recent mission to Romania was in August 2013 to explore a new model for public/private partnerships in twenty-first-century diplomacy. His sensitivity to God-ordained opportunities and his persistence in the face of setbacks always inspire me. Dr. Alush Gashi of Kosovo was my primary diplomatic partner in Kosovo and continues to be a personal friend. His persistent advocacy in Europe and America for the cause of Kosovar Albanians made an important impact on perceptions by policy makers and influencers. Daniel Philpott first traveled with me to Bosnia in 1996 on his first diplomatic mission. I still remember our breathless run through the traffic-clogged streets of Sarajevo to a meeting with President Alija Izetbegovic. In Kashmir, he became a valued partner in pioneering that work as part of numerous diplomatic missions both to India and Pakistan. There were many others who played a role in our European diplomatic missions: Zdenek Krejei, Zednek Sedivy, Harlan Harmsen, Kirk Irwin, John Kennedy, Prince James Mahlangu, Simon Mgidi, Paul and Ursula Toaspern, Jan Carnogoursky, Steve Bunting, Randy Tift, Ruth Wilson, Bill Bru, Konstanin Victorin, Emil Komarik, Antonin Srholac, Vierel Pavel, Ruth Blosser, Kevin English, John Cox, Frances Tieszen, Craig Lyon, Stewart North, and Jacob Finci.

Second, I would like to acknowledge the individuals who shared with me in the work of faith-based diplomacy in Kashmir from 2000 to 2008. As mentioned earlier, Dan Philpott was part of this work from the very first diplomatic mission to Delhi and Srinagar in 2000. He witnessed some of the most challenging and dangerous moments of this work as it unfolded on the doorstep of Al Qaeda. He will remember our meeting with General Abdullah in Islamabad a year prior to September 11. Firdous Syed Baba was the single most important partner in our work of faith-based diplomacy in Indian Kashmir. As a former militant commander, he was a controversial figure in Kashmir. Nevertheless, he grasped the significance of faith-based reconciliation and its tremendous potential in the Kashmir Valley during our first meeting. Much of the profound impact of our work was due to his skillful political analysis as well as his unusual ability to mobilize people for a cause greater than themselves. Dr. Kamal Chenoy was a great friend to us in helping us to better understand the conflict on the ground and opening the right doors for us. Shah Ghulam Qadir and Amjad Yousef played a similar visionary role in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. Both of these men became my friends as well as colleagues in our work in Kashmir. Tahir Aziz became not only a dear friend, but also a wise counselor in guiding me through the minefield of Kashmiri and Pakistani politics, including how to relate to the ISI. Usman Ali Khan, the grandson of Sardar Qayoom, became a reluctant convert to faith-based reconciliation. However, he became one of my protégés. The Kashmiri Core Group are close to my heart and included: Chander Khanna, Iftikhar Bazmi, Raouf Rasool, Bashir Manzer, Mohammed Ramzan Khan, Tsering Tsomo, Bashir Mir, Gowhar Fazili, Shahid Sleem, Dauood Iqbal, Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi, Karamat Qayoom, A. R. Hanjura, Anil Chaudry, and R. K. Bharti. There were many others who played a role in our Kashmiri diplomatic missions: Rajmohan Gandhi, I. K. Gujral, Amit Amla, Khalid Rahman, Zachariah Koshy, Varghese Matthew, M. L. Francis, Clare Cox Rice, John Parsons, Frances Tieszen, Dick Tiff, and Ashique Hamdani.

Third, I would like to acknowledge the individuals who shared with me in the work of faith-based diplomacy in the Middle East from 2005 up to the present day. Bassam Ishak and I have shared many joys and challenges together since we met and became friends in 1986 at Church of the Apostles in Fairfax, Virginia. We first traveled to Syria together in 1990. From 2005 to 2009, we sought to bring faith-based reconciliation to Syria from within by cooperating with the Assad regime. From 2011 to the present, we have worked with the Syrian opposition leaders to equip them with a vision of national healing and reconciliation in Syria. I believe he is God’s person to build this movement in Syria. Dale Gavlak became my friend in 1986 as well. Her years as a journalist in Cairo and Amman were only superseded by her role as an intercessor for God’s purposes in the Middle East. Jamal Al-Tahat of Amman is a visionary and political activist in Jordan. He built a bridge between the top leadership of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and me, which has borne much fruit. Gabriel Abdalla of Jerusalem is my oldest friend in the Middle East. Owner of Sindbad Travel in Jerusalem, we became friends in 1978. I can never forget his 2:00 a.m. phone call to me in 2013 to inform me that he had just purchased a building in Bethlehem as a venue for a school of faith-based diplomacy. It is ironic that the message of faith-based reconciliation is coming full circle back to its origin. Dr. Alick Isaacs, Dr. Avinoam Rosenak, and Sharon Leshem-Zinger of the Talking Peace Project of Israel have not only become my partners in faith-based diplomacy in Israel, but also dear friends of the heart. Together, we are crafting a faith-based approach to restoring relationships in the Middle East neighborhood. I am so thankful to Gilead Sher who brought us together. Marty Karp from the Jewish Federation based in Jerusalem is both a friend and the person who opened so many doors for us in Israel. Shalom Lerner and Meir Malka of Beit Shemesh became partners of the heart in developing the focused relationship with the Beit Shemesh Foundation. Sami Awad and Salim Munayer were our partners in the project working with Palestinian Christians and Muslims from Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour to combine Salim’s methodology of the Desert Encounter with my methodology of Faith-Based Reconciliation. How can I ever forget sleeping in a Bedouin tent in Wadi Rum with thirty young Palestinian leaders and spending all day riding a camel around Wadi Rum like Lawrence of Arabia? Alia Ismail of Beirut, a former student of mine at the Straus Institute, made it possible for my two books on faith-based reconciliation to be translated into Arabic and published in Beirut by Antoine and Evlyne Messarra. No acknowledgment would be complete without mentioning my two colleagues from the PACIS Project in Faith-Based Diplomacy: Tim Pownall and Michael Zacharia. Our association through the Straus Institute and the generous funding of Pepperdine University made many of our diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East possible. Tim and Michael are cherished partners in our work with the Talking Peace Project, the Muslim Brotherhood, and with the Syrian opposition. There were many others who played a role in our Middle East diplomatic missions: Sheik Salah Kuftaro, Dr. Mohammed Habash, Sr. Agnes Maryam, Tahir Aziz, Fr. Hanna Dally, Fr. Nael Rahmoun, Bishop Suheil Dawani, Benny Levy, Canon Shehadeh Shehadah, Dr. Nabil Al-Kofahi, Dr. Rohile Gharabaih, John Sandoz, Dr. Wallace Shepherd, Clare Rice, Dana Moldovan, and John Parsons.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the key role of Storm Harvey and her work of prayer and fasting during our diplomatic missions over so many years in Kashmir and the Middle East. She is truly a dedicated and humble servant of God. I also want to acknowledge the role of Leslie Smith and her work as my secretary and right-hand person in this work. Over the past sixteen years, her servant heart has made my burdens easier to bear.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

In January 2005, I visited Damascus, Syria, to meet with Syrian officials and religious leaders to explore the potential of beginning the work of faith-based reconciliation in the Middle East. During my time in Damascus, I met with Sheik Salah Kuftaro, son of the late grand mufti of Syria. Toward the conclusion of our meeting, he invited me to speak the next day at Abunour Mosque during Jumu’ah prayer. Following Friday prayers at the mosque, Sheik Kuftaro invited my friend Bassam Ishak and me to have lunch with him at a nearby restaurant. Later, as we left the restaurant, he pulled me aside and said through the translator, I have listened carefully to your message about faith-based diplomacy and reconciliation, and I have come to the conclusion that this is not a project of a Washington DC–based NGO. It is the work of the prophets.

In Isaiah 2:4 of the Jewish scriptures, the prophet wrote:

God shall mediate between the nations and shall judge for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.

In the main foyer of the Israeli Knesset, there is a very prominent three-panel mural by Marc Chagall devoted to biblical Israel, the rebirth of the modern state of Israel, and the End of Days. The panel on the End of Days is based on this very passage of the Jewish scriptures. Could it be that the prophet Isaiah was seeing far into the future, to events that would not unfold until twenty-six centuries later: the emergence of a wholly new paradigm in the strategic political realm known as faith-based diplomacy?

In 1996, I was invited to a meeting in Washington DC convened by former secretary of state James Baker under the auspices of the National Prayer Breakfast movement. It was a small group of men and women who had been involved in reconciliation efforts in the Balkans and the Middle East. There I met Dr. Douglas Johnston who, at that time, was executive vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC. As we began to share our hearts, we discovered that we had a common vision and passion to bring faith and politics together in the cause of peacemaking and reconciliation. In 1994, he had edited a book entitled Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft. It was a landmark publication intended largely for the US foreign policy and national security community that sought to shift the prevailing paradigm of religion as part of the problem and the cause of conflict to a new paradigm: religion as an asset for peacemaking. As he listened to me describe my work of faith-based reconciliation in East Central Europe and the Balkans, he responded, You’re doing the very work in the field that I have been writing and speaking about. Three years later, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy was born in Washington DC, and I became the senior vice president.

At one of the earliest meetings of senior officials of ICRD, the main topic was how to refer to our work—as religious peacebuilding or faith-based diplomacy. All of us were aware of and respected the work of Professor Scott Appleby at the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame. His model of religious peacebuilding was a compelling model for describing faith-based initiatives and faith-based actors in the field of conflict. However, we came to realize that through ICRD, a wholly new paradigm was emerging that very intentionally sought to integrate faith and politics and that was focused on a very specific type of large-scale political conflict: intractable identity-based conflicts. Hence, we came to the consensus among us that it would be called faith-based diplomacy.

In the year 2000, I completed a master’s degree in dispute resolution at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution of Pepperdine University Law School in Southern California. I now possessed the credentials of a professional in the field of conflict resolution. A year later, the associate director of the Straus Institute, Professor Peter Robinson, asked me to teach a course based on the work I had been doing in the field in East Central Europe, Sudan, Kashmir, and the national Episcopal Church. We called that course Faith-Based Diplomacy and International Peacemaking. For several years, it became a regular offering each spring semester.

Then in 2007, the new assistant director of the Straus Institute, Timothy Pownall, was invited by me to participate in a faith-based reconciliation gathering in Larnaca, Cyprus, that brought together American Christian leaders with Syrian and Jordanian Muslim political leaders. I had hoped that he would catch the vision for linking together a Washington DC nongovernmental organization with a faith-based academic institution to provide both an academic program and field projects in faith-based diplomacy. I was already thinking ahead into the future, of the need to inspire and train future generations of faith-based diplomats.

In November 2008, the PACIS Project in Faith-Based Diplomacy was born as a joint initiative of ICRD and the Straus Institute. Dr. Douglas Johnston and Dean Ken Starr of Pepperdine Law School signed an official memorandum of understanding, and we were underway. Tim Pownall and I became the founding directors of the PACIS Project, and Michael Zacharia completed this faith-based triumvirate. In 2011, both the university and the law school faculty approved an official concentration in the MDR degree program in faith-based diplomacy. Our hope and dream has been that the PACIS Project will become a nerve center for inspiring, training, and deploying religiously inspired individuals into the many intractable identity-based conflicts around the world. We believe that over time, it will produce scholarly contributions to this emerging discipline of faith-based diplomacy that will help better define the field that will enable future faith-based diplomats to learn from our failures and successes. And most important of all, it will be composed of individuals who themselves are on a journey of reconciliation and who bring to the field the richness of that transformational pilgrimage.

The purpose of this book is to share the principles and methods of faith-based diplomacy, to capture some of the lessons learned from the field, to provide an example of a journey involving the Syrian conflict that began in 2011, and to provide insights based on the cumulative experience from years as a field operative in East Central Europe and the Balkans from 1990 to 1998, in Kashmir from 2000 to 2008, and in the Middle East from 2005 up to the present.

So what are the principles of faith-based diplomacy that define its character and uniqueness? That is the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

Principles of Faith-Based Diplomacy

One day in 2002, I was working in my study when I received a phone call from a former US national security advisor. He had just read my report on the latest ICRD mission to Kashmir. After the initial greetings on the phone, he said, I have just finished reading your report on Kashmir and found it to be remarkably naïve. My response was silence. After a protracted silence over the phone, he continued, "Let me explain what I mean by naive. It does not mean what you might be thinking. I am not suggesting for one second that you do not understand the complexities of the conflict or the correlation of political and militant forces in play. On the contrary, your report about Kashmir not only reveals a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the conflict, but your fresh and unique approach gave me a feeling of hope because, as a person of faith, it reminded me that God is at work in even the strategic political realm and above and beyond our human efforts. Thank you for reminding me of that."

Faith-based diplomacy is an emerging paradigm in the strategic political realm that is defined by five principles that capture and describe its essential character and nature.

Principle 1

• Faith-based diplomacy is an emerging discipline that seeks to integrate religion, politics, and conflict resolution in the cause of peacemaking in an international or cross-cultural context.

If I were to describe it using a mathematical equation, it would look like this:

religion + politics + conflict resolution + international context = faith-based diplomacy

In the Illustrated Dictionary of Religion, Philip Wilkinson describes religion this way:

A religion is a set of beliefs and practices that shapes or directs human life and death, or a commitment to ideas that provide coherence for one’s existence. Adherence to a religion implies a belief in a divine force, as well as offering moral guidance for believers. Religions also bind people into communities with common goals and values.

Historian Scott Appleby at Notre Dame describes four constituent elements of religion:

• Creed

A body of ideas and teachings or a short confessional statement.

• Cultic Expression

Encompasses prayers, devotions, spiritual disciplines, communal worship and ritual, holy days and seasons, sacred places, religious institutions, and sacred objects and icons.

• Moral Code

Moral norms governing behavior or core values or a fundamental moral vision of the community.

• Confessional Community

A community that defines personal and social identity and where spiritual growth occurs.

From a Jewish perspective, religion is understood not so much as dogma or ethics, not as creedal or confessional—but as a relational journey or pilgrimage. In Psalm 1, the psalmist describes the fork in the road between walking with God and walking without God. It is a choice that every person makes in life, either by intention or implication. Our religion is the way that we choose to walk in life. For Jews, Abraham epitomized the fork in the road by choosing a new ideal of walking by faith, not by sight. This was understood as being an axial point in human history. Through Abraham and the Abrahamic Covenant, God chooses Israel for a unique destiny. If Israel will submit to God’s rule and authority, God will bless them and cause them to be a blessing to all the nations. This unique destiny cannot be understood apart from Israel’s call to the Promised Land. From there they are to be a light to the nations. The healing of the nations is understood in terms of the expression tikkun olam bemalchut shaddai (to heal, to repair, to transform the world under the dominion of God). The Torah given to Moses at Mount Sinai was not only a moral framework for Israel, but a tangible way to submit to God’s sovereignty. The Davidic rule was seen as the idealized Abrahamic state—bringing faith and politics together with Jerusalem as the capital, as God’s city and the city of the great king. (Psalm 48)

From a Christian perspective, religion is understood in terms of the gospel or good news, which is the invitation and challenge to all people to become people of faith like Abraham. The way to become a person of faith is by submitting to the authority of Jesus as King—to his teachings, his example, and his offer of eternal life through faith. Eternal life is understood as a restoration of intimacy with God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Loving God means dying to self; and loving one’s neighbor means expanding one’s moral boundaries and developing a reconciling spirit. Jesus called his disciples to be salt and light to the world, transforming the world to reflect the sovereignty of God. The great cause of God was understood to be the Kingdom of God or the healing of the nations.

From an Islamic perspective, religion is understood in terms of submission to the sovereignty of God—which, by implication, leads to an integration of faith and politics. Muhammed was understood to be the Rasul Allah, the final messenger of God and the seal of the prophets. The Quran is understood to be the perfect word of God, and the Hadith are the sayings and actions of Muhammed. Faith is not a private matter between the individual and God, but rather propels a person toward the five pillars of Islam, toward dawa and jihad (the defense and spread of the faith).

I began my own journey of faith as an infant in Chicago within the Anglican tradition of Christianity. I was baptized at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on July 2, 1950, on the south side of Chicago near our home. As my parents made those baptismal promises on my behalf, they were bringing me into the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12:1–3) and pledging to raise me to love God and my neighbor through Jesus Christ.

At the age of six, I was ready to begin the first grade of public school. However, in the 1950s, the public school system in Chicago was very poor. So my parents enrolled me in a local Roman Catholic school. A year later, they decided to actually join the Roman Catholic Church, and so I was baptized again as a Roman Catholic and—a year later—made my first Communion. One weekday morning, as I was attending Mass, I had my first profound faith experience. As I watched the priest say the Eucharistic Prayer, I could literally feel the palpable and overwhelming awareness of the majesty of God. Without realizing it, that moment marked my soul forever and pointed my course on the Abrahamic journey of faith.

In 1959, my family moved from Chicago to Southern California and settled in the city of Whittier. Two years later, my parents decided to return to the Episcopal Church, and we found ourselves becoming very involved in the life of St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Whittier under the leadership of the senior pastor, Albert Jenkins.

At the age of twelve, I discovered my first real passion in life: politics. My parents had been lifelong blue-collar Democrats, but I chose the Republican Party as my own. I was attracted by the conservative political philosophy. I began to walk precincts, register new voters, and campaign with local candidates for the State Assembly. I remember one candidate in particular who took me under his wing as he campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly. When I entered the University of Southern California, I became very involved in campus politics during the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During my senior year, I was the president of the USC Young Republicans. Ironically, one of my good friends was the president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing campus activist group. In spite of our seemingly irreconcilable political ideologies, he would call me for political counsel and advice.

My dream was a career in national politics. I had the path all charted. One evening when I was twenty-one years old, I was speaking at a political dinner in Los Angeles. Afterward, an older man grabbed me by the tie and pulled me into a corner. When he introduced himself, I realized that I was talking to one of the many architects of Ronald Reagan’s rise as governor of California and, later, president of the United States. He said to me, Son, you’ve got what it takes to go all the way. You’re smart, charismatic, and ruthless. Stick with me and I’ll get you there. Those were heady words for an ambitious twenty-one-year-old politician. But … God had other ideas about the direction of my life. Some months later, I began to experience a profound sense of disillusionment with myself and what I had become, with my fellow political activists, and with politics itself. A few months after that, I left politics behind, and at the encouragement of my pastor, Albert Jenkins, I pursued ordination as an Episcopal priest. I did my theological training in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Episcopal Divinity School and at Harvard Divinity School, which were sort of joined at the hip as part of the Boston Theological Institute. It was there on October 23, 1972, that I submitted my life to the authority of God by surrendering to Jesus as my Savior and Lord. I was filled with the spirit of God and felt a profound sense of joy and intimacy with the Lord. That mountaintop experience transformed me and fundamentally began to reorient my whole personhood.

In 1975, I was ordained as an Episcopal priest and began serving as a pastor of two small congregations in Beaumont and Banning, California. However, eleven years later, God drew me back into the world of politics, but in a very different way. This time, I would be seeking to integrate faith and politics. It began shortly after our move to Northern Virginia to serve as a senior associate in a large Episcopal congregation in Fairfax. I went to meet Dr. Richard Halverson, who at that time was chaplain of the US Senate. During the course of our conversation, he told me that there was one senator who concerned him, and he felt perhaps I was the right person to reach him. So he arranged a meeting between the two of us and then, during the meeting, quietly excused himself. The senator and I connected almost immediately, and that began a process of regular meetings and a wide variety of spiritual conversations. At the time, I had no idea that I was beginning the training and preparation for faith-based diplomacy. At a very deep level, I was beginning to understand the intersection of faith and politics that is inherent in the Abrahamic tradition shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Principle 2

• Faith-based diplomacy is a form of track-two diplomacy that is ideally suited for the changing security environment of the twenty-first century.

Track-one diplomacy is traditional Westphalian-era diplomacy involving relationships between sovereign states and their duly appointed representatives. Track-two diplomacy views the process of international peacemaking as a living system, which includes contributions of citizen diplomats and non-state actors such as NGOs, business leaders, private citizens, educators, activists, or religious leaders. Dr. Louise Diamond, formerly of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, described it this way:

Multi-track diplomacy is a multi-disciplinary view of peace-building. It assumes that individuals and organizations are more effective working together than separately, and that ethnic and regional conflict situations involve a large and intricate web of parties and factors that requires a systems approach.

Track-one diplomacy has certain inherent advantages in being a universally recognized and accepted means for ordering the international system and enabling states to communicate, negotiate, cooperate, and send each other signals. Besides an established system and structure, it has authority, money, and military force.

Track-two diplomacy—although it is a newer concept and less well developed as a discipline—brings certain inherent advantages such as having no interests to advance or defend, greater creativity in crafting out of the box solutions, deniability if an initiative fails, trusted relationships that can be built with leaders at all levels of a conflict, and a greater capacity for risk taking in some of the world’s roughest neighborhoods, which defy simple political settlements and involve engaging with one’s enemies.

In 1993, I arranged for Dr. Jan Carnogoursky, the former prime minister of Slovakia, to be invited to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. He accepted the invitation, and I served as his host. Over the course of three days together, he heard, over and over, about coming together in the name and spirit of Jesus, about reconciliation, and about being a leadership under God based on spiritual and moral values. Three weeks after he returned to Slovakia, he sent me a fax and said that he was so inspired by his experience that he would like to undertake a reconciliation mission to Croatia and that he would like Juraj Kohutiar (who later became Slovakia’s director of Central Intelligence) and me to accompany him. So the three of us spent close to a week together in Croatia meeting with officials, political and religious leaders, and military commanders. Between our meetings, we would discuss what happened. I could ask questions such as Why did you say that? What do you think he was thinking? What was your analysis of that meeting? One evening at dinner, I asked, What is the proper protocol and etiquette when you are meeting a head of state? And he explained to us in careful detail. A few days later, as I was flying home from Europe, I realized that I had just spent a week receiving an intensive course in diplomacy that could never be duplicated in the classroom.

In 1996, I was working with Dr. Landrum Bolling on an initiative in Sarajevo with the leadership of the small indigenous Jewish community of Bosnia-Herzegovina to bring together the Serbian Orthodox metropolitan and the Roman Catholic cardinal with the grand mufti of the Muslim community in a public stand for reconciliation in Bosnia. One evening over dinner, Landrum told me the story of how President Carter had invited him to the White House and asked him to serve as a back channel conduit to Yasser Arafat. He was instructed that when he had a message for the president, that he was to call and arrange to have tea with the First Lady and the message would be delivered indirectly. In essence, Landrum was doing privately and with unofficial sanction what Ambassador Andrew Young—our UN ambassador—was fired for doing publicly at the same time.

During that same period, I was having lunch one day with the deputy chief of mission from the embassy of Yugoslavia at a Washington DC hotel. At one point during lunch, he said, My president and my government would appreciate it if you could speak to former secretary James Baker about serving as a third-party intermediary in our conflict with the Kosovar Albanians. I replied, I’m sorry, I don’t know Mr. Baker, and I changed the topic. Later, he once again said, My president and my government would appreciate it if you would speak to former secretary James Baker about serving as a third-party intermediary in our conflict with the Kosovar Albanians. I replied, Why don’t you approach him directly yourselves? And I once again changed the topic. Toward the end of our luncheon, he once again said, "My president and my government would appreciate